


The Force Ghosts of Future Yet to Come

by kaboomslang



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mild Voyeurism, Miscommunication, Pining, That's Not How The Force Works, Time Travel, baze is oblivious, chirrut is intense, teen guardians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-27 10:33:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10011695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaboomslang/pseuds/kaboomslang
Summary: Chirrut is a blazing sun, but Baze is stuck in the wrong orbit, only ever seeing an eclipse. They can't seem to sort their shit out, so the Force intervenes for the sake of the galaxy.





	

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY. This took a turn for the kinda weird when I wrote it. I meant it to be John Hughsian, it turned out like, idk, Heathers or something. Anyway this is a love letter to ambiguously force-sensitive Baze, and dear, crazy, sinister Chirrut. The man sits on dead bodies like he's having a picnic.
> 
> The entire premise for this fic is inspired by one of my favourite fics of all time, an Altair/Malik story by tanyart called [Tomorrow Was Not Dull.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/283910) I'd like to think I did it justice, without copying directly lmao
> 
> As ever, huge thank you to [GreyMichaela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyMichaela/pseuds/GreyMichaela) for being a patient and educational beta <3
> 
> enjoy!!

He can’t stand him.

“I can’t stand him,” he says. Kujhat snorts wetly in disbelief and takes another long slurp from Baze’s goblet.

Despite the ice packs and the bacta, Kujhat’s nose is still a mess from their morning lessons, where Chirrut had caught his arm, twisted, and hauled his face down to meet a bony kneecap. Excessive perhaps, but it wasn’t as if they were encouraged to pull their punches. Guardians needed to be able to defend the Temple to the death, after all.

Baze had fumed on the sidelines of the reed mat and watched Chirrut help to lead Kujhat away, apologetic and joking at the same time. The sun had burnished his open, handsome face, glancing off the worried uptick of his stupid eyebrows and his exposed collarbones. Baze hates that he remembers that part so vividly, and forces it down.

Chirrut would have been the picture of guileless concern, charming everyone, had he not looked over his shoulder to slant his knowing grin straight at Baze.

Just thinking about it sends heat to his face, confusing anger and a secret thrill down his spine. No one else ever looks at him like that, nor does Chirrut look at anyone like that other than Baze. He knows, because he watches carefully. He just wishes it didn’t come as a cost of Chirrut’s well-hidden mean streak, the knowledge of which is another roiling, stomach-churning gift Chirrut bestows on him and him alone.

Green blood trickles sluggish into Baze’s cactus juice from Kujhat’s nose and he grimaces, pushing his plate away.

“He’s going to seriously hurt someone. He’s irresponsible, and nobody seems to care but me.”

“So you’ve mentioned. About a hundred times already, since breakfast.”

Baze slides his glare sideways from Chirrut holding court outside under the riad’s lone orange tree to fix on Kujhat, who screws his face up, mimicking Baze. “I think I have more reason to hate him than you. Look at my fucking face.”

“You look better now,” Baze mutters, earning himself a thump in the ribs. “And I don’t _hate_ him.”

“ _I_ know that. But you just said you couldn’t stand him, like two seconds ago.”

“I can’t. I don’t understand him. Doesn’t mean I hate him though, just means he’s annoying.” And Force, is Chirrut annoying. Wonderful, captivating, but annoying. The most galling thing about it is, he almost makes himself impossible to hate.

“You two have the weirdest friendship.” Kujhat clears his throat and brandishes Baze’s cup like a king from a story, wheezing in his Grandmaster voice, “ _How can any Guardian_ _, in training or actively serving, hope to feel the Force’s guidance if they continue to deny themselves the most basic truths of their character. It is a blockade in the road to enlightenment._ ” He coughs.

Baze looks up from where he’d buried his head in his hands. “I’m not denying anything _about_ myself. How did this become about me? This is about _him.”_ He points to Chirrut, who’s now juggling a handful of stale rolls, to the delight of his many admirers.

“Isn’t it always,” says Kujhat, concentrating on his rice as if it’s the most interesting holo he’s ever seen, rather than meet Baze’s pointed glowering. Baze gives up, and slumps back to face the courtyard.

A chill breeze does nothing to cool Baze’s flaming cheeks as Chirrut catches his eyes unerringly through the pillars and shadows of the mess hall, catches him looking again. The bright flash of steel braces in his smile mocks Baze, reminds him of Chirrut’s unbending endoskeleton of courage and foolhardiness, the one that never fails to keep him upright against suicidal odds. The one that will get him killed some day, the one that keeps Baze up at nights.

He shifts on his cushion, and doesn’t blink. Chirrut tilts his head quick like a sparrowhawk.

It would be easier if he was a smug, cocksure little ass, determined to outstrip his peers even further than he already has simply for the glory. Maybe then Baze could help him seek guidance and humility. There is no helping Chirrut, only following. If the Force is a current, an ocean, then Chirrut is an albatross and Baze the crude ships of old, desperately adjusting his rudder to follow in the hope-stained wake.

No, Baze would never dismiss a fellow Temple brother or sister as a lost cause, but it would have been easier to let Chirrut run his foolish course, had his trajectory not pointed somewhere far above Jedha’s orbit, meant for something bigger than them all. It would have been easier, but since Chirrut had barrelled into his Temple like a meteor strike, Baze’s life has never taken the easy route.

~

 

Chirrut had come to them during Baze’s tenth standard year, more than six cycles ago. Rumours had flooded unchecked about the new boy, nearly feral, they called him. Savage and clever about it, they said, like a trained wolf. Baze had come to quickly learn these were merely exaggerations, rather than outright lies. The only reason the Masters had seen fit to draw him into the fold, rather than relocate him to an off-world orphanage like so many others, had been because of the string of kyber shards hung round his neck like sharks’ teeth, a spiked collar for a fighting dog. Like war-trophies from the very ground they walked on.

“He must have stolen them,” Uqin had said, pretending to be haughty and disinterested and fooling no one. The crystals had to have been worth untold credits to a street urchin like that.

Baze had watched with a strange ringing in his ears as two adult Guardians wrestled the rangy boy further into the Temple, hopefully to be bathed. It had been winter then and he had been barefoot with long unkempt hair, dirty and bare armed but blazing all the same. They would all have stared at him even if he had arrived in processional splendor with all the dignity of the most enlightened monk, serenity cloaking his edges, because a sun burned within him.

They had stared in silence, an unnatural hush filling the vaulted entrance chamber and guttering the candles as the storm howled outside. They had watched the boy fight every step. Snarling and shooting kicks of sparks at his wardens, dark eyed with a belt of jagged crystals around his neck. He seemed more otherworldly than the strangest aliens who visited their altars, a small piece of the storm allowed inside.

He broke free and scrambled forward, was caught again.

Baze’s gut had twisted when the boy loosed one ragged scream for help to his spellbound audience. The ringing in his head had built to a cacophony, dizzying him. His fingers twisted in his robes where they knelt, and Uqin tried to yank him back down with all four hands when Baze had stumbled to his feet, staring at the new boy’s furious, terrified face.

The effect had been instantaneous. One of the Guardians had staggered on the icy cobbles with the sudden slack in her arms as the boy stiffened and stopped. He was staring back at Baze, chest heaving and blood dripping down his chin from where he’d bitten his own lip to stain the glittering kyber.

Baze was aware the other initiates were riveted between them but he couldn’t look away, suddenly mortified by all the attention now focused on him, by the hyena gaze of this dark newcomer.

The ringing quietened to something like a heartbeat, a drumbeat in a cave of icicles. He had the horrible feeling that something significant was happening, that he was being measured for a task he knew nothing about. Then the boy had bared sharp and crooked teeth at him in a grin, and maybe Baze could see why they’d called him a wolf. Dera’ath, the Guardian gripping his other arm had given him a wary tug towards the stairs and he had turned without complaint. His head stayed cranked round towards Baze, his jet eyes still boring holes into his own, and Baze had the jolting sensation that he had passed whatever test he had been set, whether he wanted to or not.

The great doors of the high chambers had swung deafeningly shut behind them like the morning gong heralding a new day, a new beginning.

They had kept the boy under lock and key for months which, when coupled with his dramatic entrance, had been the main source of the rumours.

“Secret experiments,” Zariya had confided pompously to Baze once while they were scrubbing the kitchen floors in preparation for the solstice feast. “It’s got to be. He’s crazy.” Baze threw a sudsy cloth at his face and went silently back to work.

Uqin had been more realistic. “They’re probably just teaching him how to read, and be normal.”

“How do you know he can’t read already?” said Baze with his eyes fixed on his weaving, his fingers flexing unconsciously. He had felt an itching on the back of his neck during those initial months, like he was always being watched from a high window.

“Well,” Uqin started, then hung her head, ears flattening to her skull in shame. “I suppose, maybe he can. I don’t know. None of us know him, not yet.”

Baze knew better than them all. He had been training steadfastly for his trials, preparing to ascend to the second duan. First in his skill-class to attempt it, but the Masters had assured him he was more than capable. It had been one of his duties to rise every day as the timed lanterns hummed awake, when dawn would have spread pink across the sky had it not been the depths of winter. He’d grit his teeth against the punch of cold to his ribs when he rolled from his cot, pulling on his thick robes with the insulated hood.

The trek to the tip of the South Spire was exposed to the elements. Winds whipped skyward from the steppe to release a terrible shriek from the void below in the darkness, the city’s lights ending so abruptly they could well have been a shining boat on an inky sea. A lone ship lost in space.

The tower had been designed deliberately flute-like with curves and spirals and openings cut into its rust red walls, so that it sang out over the city during storms, a siren beckoning desert travelers to her peaceful caverns.

Climbing it was impossibly cold, the steps impossibly narrow. Baze would alternate praying with counting those steps, and with cursing the stretches open completely to the sky, clinging to the thick cable that coiled around the spire’s walls. His task was to keep the winter beacon lit. A funnel ran from the mines thousands of feet below, up through the tower’s core and emerging to pump crystalline kyber vapor into the firecage at the spire’s peak. Not only was the Temple a siren, she was a lighthouse too.

Baze’s job was to pump the bellows and keep the glowing lumps of magnesium in the cage’s grate blistering hot, igniting the vapor to a blinding blue-green roar. The fire itself wasn’t hot at all, which seemed to Baze to make the entire venture more needlessly sadistic than it already was. He could see the inelegant metaphor of it all, which he supposed was really the point, as well as serving the Jedhan people with a guiding star when their own had vacated the horizon for the season.

Keeping the Whills’ fire burning in the face of such gnashing adversity was to instill a sense of perseverance in his heart, a sense of duty to the Temple. Feeling necessary to those around him, feeling like he had a true calling to pursue for a cause bigger than himself shielded him from his old wounds, but never let it be said that his Masters didn’t enjoy some good blunt symbolism.

The climb warmed him some, but the descent was torturous and fraught, especially on mornings when bitter sleet cut through his hood to slice at his face. It was one of those mornings when he had first spied Chirrut through an uppermost window in the Temple’s rear wall.

He had stopped to catch his breath and gather his resolve—not his _nerve_ , he wasn’t _scared—_ when a light flickered at the edge of his vision. The telltale amber glow of a powercell gilded a shape, then a silhouette, then a face. _The new boy_ , thought Baze, _he’s been up there the whole time._ He still clung tight to the freezing cable but shifted closer to the edge of his steps, straining for a better look. He forgot about his harness, and the flat lantern hooked firmly to his chest.

The boy’s focus had snapped to him immediately, a bird of prey sighting a jerboa on a mountainside. Baze gulped. The boy was clean, and his bones didn’t protrude so alarmingly as they had that first day. Were it not for his eyes, Baze would almost have thought he looked friendly, but that gaze had pinned him like a struggling butterfly to the pillar at his back. Freezing drizzle fell into the yawning space between them, their respective lights casting the rest of their surroundings into thick darkness.

For a moment Baze’s cold-stung, fear-dipped mind recalled to him a story he had once heard, of a dark eyed beast of a man who could transform into a bat, and flew from windows on nights like those to hunt for blood.

Then the boy had smiled, and lifted a hand to wave at him.

Baze’s grip on the cable slackened with surprise, and he wobbled alarmingly before flattening himself to the steps. When he looked back up at the window, the light was off and the boy had vanished.

He never told the other initiates about it. He trusted his Masters to have a good reason for keeping the boy separate, but he couldn’t help wondering about that moment, about that wave. The boy’s head had been shaved like the rest of them, but the smile still made Baze tense, raise the drawbridge and fill the moat around his good will. There was something manic in it, Baze had thought. Something calculating, like a hypnotist deciding on his next victim. Baze hoped he was wrong. He was always good at reading faces and people, helped along by some instinctive compass in his chest.

Over the next month he had seen the boy more often than not on his morning ascents, sometimes stopping for long minutes to watch through that one illuminated square of activity.

He watched the boy tap slowly at datapads, watched him scribble on what looked like spare scrolls. Very occasionally the boy was doing something that looked an awful lot like forms, but they were nothing similar to the graceful, poised movements Baze knew from lessons.

No, the boy looked... powerful, in a way Baze knew from watching old holos of gladiators and mercenaries. Soldiers. The amber light in the window would strobe as the boy ducked and weaved, low to the ground with his feet spread and his torso coiled and waiting like a cobra ready to strike. He would lash out unexpectedly, striking some invisible target with fists and elbows and knees so quickly Baze could only see a blur from his tenuous vantage point.

 _He’s dangerous,_ thought Baze. _He’s dangerous and he knows how to control it._

Rarest of all were the mornings when the boy was leaning out from his window. Those were the mornings Baze resolutely ignored the harpooned weight of the focus on his chest torch, even though he felt very much like a firebug crawling up a tree trunk under the watch of a hungry sandbat. He didn’t know what was going on with the boy, but Baze preferred to let trouble come to him rather than seek it out. Fools went snooping. Safer to guard a fortress than to give cause to an attack upon it.

If the Force saw fit to bring them together, so be it, but Baze wasn’t about to interfere. Besides, if the boy was to become a fellow initiate, Baze didn’t want to be the sole bearer of his attention before he even knew his name.

He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be acquainted with this boy. He wasn’t sure if he’d be given a choice, the way his every movement up the spire was tracked with missile-focus.

In time though, in time the moment came, and they were all gathered in the lower chapel to bear witness to the boy’s second coming, the fledgling with his beak sharp and his wings already clipped.

“This is Chirrut Îmwe,” said Grandmaster Vulo, his sonorous voice barely audible over the continuing tempest outside. The noise was at odds with the sight, solar lamps backlit the chapel’s stained glass windows and cast honeyed rainbows around the room, providing them with the sun’s vitamins even during winter’s grasp.

Chirrut stood tall and proud before them, still and dark in the light where before he had been a leaping flame in the stormy night. His limbs were strong instead of spare, his face smooth and free of grime. His kyber necklace was missing. Baze watched two girls in his row giggle and nudge each other, whispering behind their hands with their eyes fixed on the stage.

“Chirrut will be joining the first duan class,” Vulo continued, “where he will soon be training for his second. A great many of you will make fine Guardians, and I have no doubt that you will welcome Chirrut as one of your own. He is here now, and all is as the Force wills it.”

Baze barely managed to repeat the mantra, his mind caught on what Vulo had said. He sat numb and conflicted as the assembly shifted and stood, the murmuring growing like an approaching bee swarm. The first duan. Chirrut was to join the first duan class already, _Baze’s_ skill-class, and train for his second. Baze had lived in the Temple for as long as he could remember. Chirrut had only just _arrived._

He was bewildered, not jealous. No, not bewildered, apprehensive. What in the hells above could Chirrut do, to impress the Masters so quickly? Through the throng of students he caught a glimpse of Chirrut’s face, still standing alone on the marble plinth. Chirrut was staring straight at him, and smiled quick and spiky when Baze met his eyes, the dark corners of his mouth showing behind his gums. Baze’s stomach lurched, because this was the closest they had ever been to one another, no chasm of fathomless dawn separating them, only a thinning crowd of other children. He frowned, but nodded once at Chirrut, who smiled wider as he was led away by Dera’ath to an antechamber, no doubt towards the barracks.

Baze shivered in the shadow of two great carved Guardians, grimly holding up the chapel’s ceiling. Chirrut had singled him out, but for what purpose?

~

 

Bells are ringing to signal afternoon lessons by the time Baze and Kujhat finish their lunches.

“What rota are you on today, then?” yawns Kujhat. “I’ve got a free period. Gonna go to the market.”

Baze’s mouth twitches into a smile despite himself. “That Veldinian girl still resisting your charms?”

“Yes, stars above, I’ll go crazy before I get any action. If only my problem was just willful fucking ignorance, like some people.”

It’s exhausting to talk to people like Kujhat sometimes, who dance around subjects for the fun of it, rather than just coming out to say what they mean. Baze sighs and checks his datapad as they make way for the little ones on kitchen duty, wandering into the echoing shade of the riad.

“I’m… sweeping today. Could be worse, I’m with Qilung. Uqin’s sister.”

Kujhat’s already gathering his pack and pulling on his soft toed boots, but he nods. “Yeah, it’s always twice as fast with them. She’s bitchier than Uqin though, so look out. Hey!”

“Don’t say stuff like that,” Baze bites out, and kicks him again. Kujhat laughs and throws him a gesture he’s clearly learned from his wasted efforts in the city bazaars, turns on his heel and flees.

Spring has come to Jedha not a moment too soon, the Masters strung to the very end of their wits with initiates indoors and underfoot for months. It has long been part of someone else’s trials to light the winter sun above them, and Baze can’t honestly say he misses the job, but he remembers the double-edged sword of emotion when he watched that first edge of a real dawn bloom across the sky after so long.

No more climbing. He had served his Temple and its flock, and even those who turned from its doors, for they too were all seeds on the wind of the Force.

No more watching Chirrut burn and blaze that window from the inside out. He hadn’t known, then, just how much he had relied on those walls to contain the fire.

Sweet scented creepers cascade down the riad’s walls, allowed to grow unnaturally on their arid moon thanks to the Temple’s shade and cloisters, the steam vents set into the mosaic floors. Humid air rises from the deep kyber salt pools to filter through rock made porous from centuries of mining.

He isn’t sure he likes feeling overhung with greenery, even when the sunlight spills green and alive across their golden robes. Quite apart from such a visceral representation of the Temple’s luxuries over the city’s slums outside, it didn’t do to be so disconnected from the sky. Trees and leaves could not grow faster than the rumours of an empire, and they certainly wouldn’t protect them from attack.

Baze sighs again as he looks up through the vine-strewn oculus, thinks about ships and fighting and dark eyes—and is winded when a broom handle thumps him in the solar plexus.

“Baze,” says Chirrut, his own broom slung jauntily over his shoulder. He stands with his feet planted and his chin jutting out, his eyes following Baze’s as close as ever as he doubles over gasping.

“Chirrut, what—where’s Qilung?”

Chirrut raises one shoulder slowly, deliberately, and jabs Baze in the chest again.

“She’s sick, nothing serious, but she told me to apologise for her. Seems like it’s just you and me, Bazey.” He drawls out the nickname, one forged in his first week of knowing Baze’s identity beyond the silent watcher, the firebug. Trust Chirrut to take something like his own peculiar accent, coupled with the lisp he hasn’t managed to shake due to his braces, and twist it into something Baze is still embarrassed by.

He snatches the bamboo from Chirrut’s unresisting grip and swipes at his feet as predictably as Chirrut’s following sidestep. It’s a dance they’ve spent the last six years perfecting. Parrying and jousting and never quite going for the jugular at the heart of all of this.

Chirrut smirks at him and Baze is almost tempted to return it when he remembers how angry he’s supposed to be with the other boy and his endless games. He frowns and doesn’t stop to think about the shade of something that drops over Chirrut’s eyes, fixes his smile a little more rigidly to his face.

“Chirrut, this isn’t free period. We actually have work to do, and I don’t want you to get punished again.”

The smirk returns in full blinding force, reaching all the way to Chirrut’s dark eyebrows and pulling up the corners of his mouth to show his gums. Baze flushes, embarrassment at his slip hunching him over to glower at the floor.

“I mean us. Me. I don’t want more trouble because of you,” he says, and shoulders past Chirrut towards the south wing of the Temple. “Come on.”

They plod through the vaulted corridors in relative silence, the Temple never truly still in the way no ecosystem can be. Chirrut doesn’t actually talk as much as people think. Maybe he gives the impression of it because everyone else is so captivated by him that he feels he has to fill the blanks left by their expectancy, their willingness to swallow any crumb he’ll give them. Baze has seen his tense discomfort when stragglers gather near his solo meditation or throng to watch his weapons practice.

Again, it isn’t as if he’s some boorish knowitall with an inflated ego, people are just—drawn to him. They see the sun in him, and turn themselves to sunflowers.

Baze has long since learned that Chirrut’s pride has less to do with his natural abilities in combat, or his quick witted responses to the Masters’ reprimands. The real source of Chirrut’s grating confidence is in his innate knowledge of just how much mischief he can get away with, how far he can push Baze’s snapping point, how crazy he makes his fellow acolytes. He’s a smiling siren of chaos.

On rose day morning, Chirrut’s footlocker is always stuffed with anonymous offerings, which he accepts with a lazy grin, even going so far as to give his many extra flowers to those who received none that year, so content is he in his admiration. He’s never given one to Baze though, because Baze always receives a single lotus every year. He tells himself he doesn’t care who it’s from.

Baze sees the eclipse in Chirrut, which is how they ended up at this standstill. There is no doubt in his mind that sun _is_ there, oh yes, the sun limning him with his cheeky, brace-corrected smiles and his talents and wisdom beyond his years. It’s simply that Baze ended up on the other side of it, where the sun is a bright ring around the darkness, a significant astrological event.

He does not fear being eclipsed by Chirrut. He just wonders why he’s the only one on the wrong side of the sun. Why he’s the only one Chirrut smiles at like _that_ , like he’s doing now, with ferocity tinging its edges into something dangerously big, and filled with an importance Baze can never quite grasp.

“Where are we going?” Chirrut asks, twirling his broom. Baze stops with one hand on the heavy studded doors leading to the south terrace, watching the tendons in Chirrut’s hand shift like plucked guzheng strings. He swallows and pushes the door open with his back, the spring breeze lacing sand around their ankles.

“Playing stupid doesn’t work on me, remember? You know where we are.”

“Mm, the South Spire. I haven’t climbed it since we achieved the second, have you?”

Baze looks up at the familiar twisting sight of the tower, so different in the daytime. His gaze slips down and sideways to Chirrut’s window, high in the otherwise unbroken stone ramparts.

“They shut me away like a princess in one of your stories,” Chirrut laughs.

Baze peers at him from under the brim of his sunhat. They never really talk about those days, and he’s glad of it. In retrospect he feels like something of a voyeur, having watched Chirrut for so long without either of them acknowledging it. Chirrut’s tipped over at an angle so he can peer right back under the hat at him, humour dancing in his eyes. He’s leaning on his broom with his ankles crossed.

Baze coughs and starts sweeping slow around the spire’s wide base. “I always wondered why you were kept so far up here. It wasn’t like you were… y’know.”

Chirrut sidles closer to him and flicks the edge of his hat. “Wasn’t what, Bazey? Dangerous?”

“Exactly.” Baze straightens up, both glad and self-conscious of the extra inches of height he has on Chirrut, of the way it makes Chirrut look up at him. It seems as if they’re taller and stronger every day, in no small part to the fact that they push each other towards it.

Chirrut’s eyes flick down his torso and back, like static, but not quick enough for Baze to miss. Baze sways a step backwards and busies himself with scanning the horizon, though he still hears Chirrut’s little barking laugh.

“I suppose they didn’t know that, at the time,” Chirrut says, and Baze tries with all his might not to shudder when the broom reeds scrape gently down the backs of his legs. “Neither did you, might I add.”

“Oh, I still don’t,” Baze says, and it comes out more seriously than he meant it to. Chirrut has told him all about his past. About his older brother, about foraging a living in the vast spaceport’s scrapyard. About the gangs and the years he hardly spoke after his brother was killed. He had told Baze this in the genial, hand-waving way he tells his unfunny jokes, which had done nothing to dispel Baze’s creeping unease in wondering how far that vicious life had buried its roots into his friend.

Chirrut has the capacity for cruelty threaded through him, one piece of the mystifying tapestry that makes him up. He had it stitched into him through no fault of his own. It isn’t fear for himself, for his own heartsickness that causes Baze to shy from pulling on that thread, it’s fear that if he pulls too hard, if he strains the weave with the sometimes unbearable weight of his love, that Chirrut will unravel beyond all recognisability.

The bristles stop poking their way under the leg of his breeches and Chirrut grabs at his shoulder to face him. He looks—

He looks _scared._

“Baze?” Tiny lines sink deeper around Chirrut’s now unsmiling mouth, and Baze’s heart falters at the note of betrayal in his quavering voice. He reaches up to grip Chirrut’s wrist, meaning to free himself but only feeling further pinned to the low wall he’s leaning against. There’s a ringing in his ears, but he knows there aren’t any wind chimes strung out here.

Chirrut’s pulse skitters and jumps under his thumb, but his voice is stronger when he demands, “Baze, are you scared of me?”

He doesn’t answer right away, and it’s too late by the time his tongue warms itself back from rigor mortis to say, “Not exactly. No. No, I’m not scared of you, Chirrut.”

“What then?” snaps Chirrut, stooping to crowd under the brim of Baze’s straw hat. “What else could it possibly be?”

The wind is building up around them, it’s always stronger up high among the Temple’s minarets. Baze is suddenly aware that he’s woefully out of his depth.

“What else could _what_ possibly be? You know I hate it when you talk in riddles, what’s going on?”

“Why else,” Chirrut spits, “wouldn’t you say something? It’s been six years, Baze, and I’m patient, but—”

Baze guffaws despite himself, but it only tightens the frustration burrowed between Chirrut’s eyebrows. “You? Patient? This from the one who was so eager to achieve the third rank that you attached flails to the _ends_ of your staff so you wouldn’t have to take two separate tests?”

“Stop changing the subject,” Chirrut says, and there it is. The crux of the fight they’re always two words away from these days. The razor steel in Chirrut’s voice bared and winding around Baze’s throat and drawing blood, choking him quiet.

His face is so close. His thick eyebrows are thunderous and his nose is scrunched the way it always is when he’s agitated. Baze closes his eyes and takes a steadying breath, because all of Chirrut’s moods are infectious, including anger.

“I’m not scared of you, Chirrut. I promise, I’m not scared of any part of you.” Chirrut’s nostrils flare as his eyes widen minutely. Baze continues, “Yeah, I know I’m the only one you allow to see that part. The dangerous part.”

Chirrut’s other arm moves to slowly cage Baze further against the low parapet.

“I just don’t know why. Do you think they would kick you out again, back to the port, if you’re not the Temple golden boy every moment of the day? If they finally saw what you’re really like? They wouldn’t, Chirrut, they wouldn’t do that.”

Chirrut’s searching eyes never leave his, but the breath he paints over Baze’s collarbone is ragged. “Keep going,” he whispers.

The rough sandstone behind him is cold under Baze’s fingers. He wonders how warm Chirrut’s hands would be. His entire body is wound tight to breaking point, winding tighter with every word he has to screw out. Words may come to Chirrut, even if they aren’t his favoured weapon, but they have to be dragged from Baze. Unluckily, Chirrut has already dragged nearly every part of him into his laserlike focus at one point or another, kicking and screaming.

Chirrut deserves not to be condescended to. Baze is slow about it, but manages to grind out, “Why am I the only one you trust with it? Why did you let me watch you practice fighting like that, up there?” He jerks his head towards the high porthole above them, and the rest comes tumbling out. When he’d said he didn’t understand Chirrut, he had meant it.

“I’m the only one who sees past all the pranks and the smiles. You look at me, and it’s like the first day they brought you here. Like there’s always been a joke between us that I’m not a part of.”

Chirrut is shaking, his eyes bright, and the fact that Baze cannot tell his mirth from anger even now just strikes his point home.

He shakes his head, but the ringing persists, sets his teeth on edge. He hates this, hates feeling stranded in the middle of an interrogation with Chirrut refusing to throw him a line. “I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know why you singled me out, Chirrut. I never asked to be part of your sick little game—”

“That’s what you think this is?” Chirrut snatches his arms back and picks up his broom, one hand clawing almost automatically at his chest. And oh, Baze is wrong again, because Chirrut isn’t laughing at him, and he isn’t angry either. He’s hurt.

“Chirrut, listen—”

“No, I’m done listening. This is what you’ve thought of me, all this time? That I was playing some kind of trick on you, that I was a time bomb and you were the only one with the codes?”

Baze can only stare, dumbstruck. Nothing about Chirrut has ever made sense, but he’s even harder to navigate with this trilling in his head, like a hundred bells struck at once and never stopping.

Chirrut sneers at him even as his lower lip trembles, and the sight of his ridiculous braces peels open a raw scab of affection in Baze’s heart. He’s messed everything up.

“Chirrut, if you’d just explain to me what this is all about—?” but he’s met with a South Jedhan curse, one of the worst, as Chirrut scrubs at his eyes and storms away to the door.

Panic mounts in Baze’s throat as he gives chase. Not in all the time he’s known him has Chirrut ever lost his temper, with Baze or anyone else. Usually Chirrut is the first to cheer someone up or diffuse an escalating situation, especially if he’s the one who had a hand in escalating it in the first place. He’s _good_ at being friendly, Baze realises, and nearly slaps himself as he sprints after Chirrut through the winding hallways, strung with paper lanterns left over from the solstice feast.

He’s just as talented at being a friend as he is at fighting, even if sometimes it’s pretend. It doesn’t matter if there’s a knife edge in Chirrut, some skin-shredding coral at the bottom of his calm sea. All he’s ever done has made an effort, and Baze has gone and spat in his face, all but called him a liar.

He's such a fool.

They’re lucky that barely half an hour has passed since afternoon lessons commenced. Baze doesn’t think the Masters would appreciate two junior acolytes tearing through the catacombs, wielding brooms like lightsabers.

His wiry, compact strength benefits Chirrut’s speed over short distances, but Baze is still taller, with lankier legs and bigger lungs in his broadening chest. He catches up with Chirrut as they round the tiled plinth of the orange tree, and tosses his broom to the side before he dives in a tackle.

They smash to the riad floor in a flurry of gangly limbs. Chirrut snarls and bucks, twists implausibly to wrench one of Baze’s arms back between his legs.

Baze doesn’t want to fight him, and tries pinning the other leg down with his body, but Chirrut kicks him hard in the side.

“Get off!” he roars, and Baze’s blood boils with the need to make him _stop._

Chirrut’s other leg slips from his grasp and hooks around Baze’s neck, squeezing tight like he can force Baze’s face into the sun-dappled floor. Adrenaline pounds through Baze’s head, a low counterpoint to the deafening, high-pitched ring he can’t seem to shake.

“Stop it,” he grunts, ignoring Chirrut’s punishing fists raining down on his back and shoulders like cataclysmic hailstones. “Just _stop it_ , Chirrut.”

Baze forces his hand out from under Chirrut’s tightening chokehold and grasps desperately for any purchase he can find. It turns out to be the collar of Chirrut’s half robe. Baze staggers to his feet with his face still mashed between the iron grip of Chirrut’s legs, his back bowing painfully under the other boy’s weight around his neck.

He hauls at Chirrut’s collar with all his strength, yanks the fabric until it rips free from the shoulder fastening. His hand closes around something sharp in Chirrut’s robes, the ringing builds to an unbearable scream in his head that he can’t keep locked behind his teeth.

The world around them rends and collapses with the rage of a dying star. The last thing to be destroyed and rebuilt in iridescent magma is the sight of Chirrut’s lips pulled back to bare his teeth in fury.

 

~

 

Just as suddenly, everything is normal again. The ringing has stopped.

They lie there panting, splayed and cracked open like split oranges from the branches above them, and Baze is too afraid to look. He’s heard of warriors feeling well and talking normally on the battlefield even with their organs spilled into wings around them,

He’s the one who breaks the silence. “I didn’t imagine that, did I?”

Chirrut is still and tense beneath him, so Baze pushes himself up for a tentative look around. Someone else must have tidied the courtyard while they were arguing, he wouldn’t have guessed it had just housed hundreds of initiates for lunch. He takes stock of himself and finds nothing out of place, save the cool, throbbing mark singed into his palm. “What in the name of the Force happened? Are we under attack?”

“Baze, look at the tree.” Chirrut’s accent is thicker, flatter on the vowels when he’s stressed, his speech losing its learned formality, and it takes Baze a moment to understand him.

He looks up at the branches above them, willing to humor Chirrut rather than antagonise him any further. His jaw slackens, and he sits bodily in the loamy earth as he cranes his neck.

The branches stretch implausibly to the very top of the riad canopy. Its shadow reaches the far wall, spilling over the inlaid mural where before it had only brushed the altars below it. It’s spring, it’s barely spring but the tree is thick with citrus blossoms that sting his nose, stark and white where there had been only dark and waxy leaves.

“What—?”

Chirrut is already shoving him aside to stand and attempts to straighten out his robes. The ripped sleeve hangs from his shoulder and he yanks at it, but isn’t quick enough to hide the silvery flash hanging low around his neck, or the dark brown marks burned into his chest.

“Your kyber,” Baze stammers, “you’re wearing your kyber again.”

Chirrut snorts, but his eyes are darting everywhere like a bird in a cage, his hand tight where it tucks the four small shards deeper into his robes. “Observant of you.”

“I didn’t realise you still had it.” Baze isn’t sure if this is what he should be focusing on at the present time, but it’s the least confusing thing that’s happened in the last hour, so he grasps it with both hands.

“Vulo allows me a piece back for every duan I achieve,” says Chirrut flatly, still not looking at him. “Helps with my advancement, he says.”

They fall silent and begin circling the area on unspoken instinct, defaulting to their training. If an enemy force has used some kind of sensory scattering weapon, or maybe a hologram, nothing effective will come from charging headfirst into battle. Baze pokes his toe at the cracked mosaic floor, remembering how they had shone unbroken in the sun not an hour ago. The sun that is now blocked by an imposter tree.

He’s so busy turning everything over in his head that he doesn’t hear the echo of approaching footsteps.

“What are you two doing out of class?”

Baze whirls around, but his attention catches on Chirrut’s stunned expression before he can register why that voice sounds so familiar. Then his own mind stalls and breaks down, because he’d recognise that sardonic apathy anywhere, even behind the crooked bulge of a nose broken long ago, and even clad in the black and red robes of a fully fledged Guardian.

“Kujhat?”

He’s fixed with a withering look. “That’s Master Delos, I’ll thank you.” Kujhat narrows his eyes as he looks between them still rooted to the spot. Baze’s thoughts feel as though they’ve been eviscerated by a waste disposal droid. “Surely you’re meant to be busy doing something? What are your names?”

They stare at each other, then back at Kujhat, currently leaning over to peer suspiciously under the brim of Baze’s hat. It’s bizarre, this whole thing is wrong, because at lunch Kujhat had been a head shorter than him.

Kujhat’s third eyelid flickers, and Baze tenses. “Wait, you look like—which skill-class are you in?”

But Chirrut is already grabbing at Baze’s hand, dragging him back towards the warren of corridors they had chased through—had they?—not minutes earlier.

“Our apologies, Master, we were sweeping but my friend was taken ill, he’s fine now, thank you, may the Force of others be with you,” Chirrut garbles, and pushes Baze hard in the small of his back when Kujhat yells something about their brooms.

“ _Go,_ ” Chirrut hisses, and they take off, hurrying to retrace their steps.

“The south terraces—” mutters Baze.

“Yes,” Chirrut replies, sharp and sounding far calmer than Baze feels.

It isn’t until they emerge back where the entire mess began that Baze lets the true calamity of the situation overtake him. He sags back against the heavy door and watches numbly as Chirrut paces to the parapet where Baze had wanted to kiss him, one of the countless places Baze has wanted to kiss him, and back again.

He’s chanting lowly to himself, “All is as the Force wills it.” It was the first thing they taught him, Baze remembers Chirrut telling him. He has wondered in the past whether it was the mantra that gave Chirrut all the permission he had ever needed, to do whatever he wanted without thought to trifles like rules, or his own safety. He has wondered whether Chirrut would have been better off in the end had he never come to the Temple, but never lets himself think through the flare of guilt and selfish want the notion spurs in him.

Jedha’s clamors and ruckus drifts up to them on a soft wind like they always do, that at least is a comfort in whatever nightmare they’ve found themselves in. Baze scans the sky and catalogues absently all the different types of ships he’s never seen before. Everything is slightly off, up to and including the way Chirrut is looking at him now, accusing.

“Baze, what did you do?”

He stares back at Chirrut, unmoving. “You can’t be serious.” Chirrut only looks at him in silence with his hands planted on his narrow waist, and if that faint hint of nerves and worry is what colours his own face whenever he looks at Chirrut, it’s no wonder the other boy had flown so far off the handle at him.

“How in all the Force’s names do you think I managed to grow the tree and make _Kujhat_ a Guardian before us? If I had the ability to see the future, don’t you think I would have told you?”

Chirrut’s eyes flash, and an old memory bubbles to the surface of Baze’s mind in an instant, a holo of great crocodilians lying in wait just below the water’s surface with infrared light reflecting menace behind their filmy pupils. The moment passes and he can breathe again, until Chirrut snatches Baze’s hand to pull him towards the spire’s base.

“Not that.” He slaps Baze’s burnt palm harsh against the stone, warmed in the sun, and says, “Look.”

Something is carved into the soft, ancient wall, and Baze traces it with one shaking finger, almost wishing he could leap from the very top of the tower above them.

A crude etching of a lotus blossom, its petals heart shaped and housing the damning letters: _B.M. + C.I._

“Chirrut,” he says thickly, refusing to look the other boy in the eye, “I didn’t do this.”

When he braves a quick look at Chirrut’s face, Chirrut is smiling again, fixed and slightly hysterical. He whispers, “But… it’s a lotus.” Then he seems to gather himself, and says brightly, falsely, “No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. And I suppose I’m a fool for hoping, aren’t I?”

Everything, everything today, or whenever they had been before, everything has mounted and mounted to an avalanche of frustration, threatening to bury him if Chirrut makes his heart pound noisily in the thin high air one more time.

“What,” Baze grits through clenched teeth, “is that supposed to mean?”

But he never finds out, because voices are approaching the terrace door, and Chirrut is grabbing his hand for the third time that day to pull him behind the parapet. They crouch among large broken pieces of terracotta pots, and dried up plants.

The door creaks open and shut, and Baze’s stomach drops at the sound of the heavy bolt being locked into place. There’s no way they can somehow sneak past now, without being caught. The voices grow closer but the wind is still high this far up in the towers, and whoever it is, is murmuring.

Chirrut still hasn’t let go of his hand, Baze realises. In fact, he’s gripping it tighter than ever, grinding the bones together, and Baze wishes they weren’t here, in this place, this time, with all the unspoken hurt between them, so he could fully appreciate it. Then he hears a laugh, and his heart stops.

That’s Chirrut’s laugh. The wild pealing start of it, steadying into something rhythmic and sure that whatever’s happening is worth laughing at. Chirrut always seems to find something to laugh at, but the boy next to him has his hand clamped over his mouth, his eyes wide and staring through the crisped brown leaves that conceal them.

“Chirrut,” Baze whispers, feeling sick. “What is it?”

His hand is jerked free when Chirrut seems to remember he’s not alone, and their eyes meet. One of Chirrut’s eyelids is twitching but he lowers his hands to clasp in front of his face, mouthing _all is as the Force wills it, all is as the Force wills it._

Something he needs help believing in, then. Something he needs cosmic permission to accept. Baze swallows around the thumping in his throat and peers around the huge pot at his back.

Two figures are ducked close together and leaning against the wide, carved wall of the spire. Tall and dressed in Guardian robes like Kujhat was, though Baze is confused at the sight of the bigger one with his back to them, his head shaggy with hair when it should have been shorn. Then the other person reaches to gently push back a thick braid, and Baze’s heart feels ready to launch from his chest in a gout of blood.

His hand flies to his ear, so prominent and the source of ridicule when his head is bald. So concealed, apparently, if his hair was allowed to grow unchecked. He chokes at the sight of what is undoubtedly himself, older and with clear years of hardship in the faint lines around his eyes, but _him._

He—the _other_ Baze, he murmurs something to his companion which draws another bright laugh, a whack in the leg from the staff he’s carrying, and oh, this could spell the end of him. The other person he’s with, it’s Chirrut. The other Chirrut.

 _His_ Chirrut is still trembling beside him, eyes fixed on the scene before them with one hand clenched in the ripped shoulder of his robes, like he’s holding himself back. He isn’t bothering to guard anything behind a smile now, and Baze isn’t sure whether it’s a good thing, because Chirrut’s expression can only be described as alarmed _._ His head is spinning. The ringing has started again in his ears.

“It’s—” whispers Chirrut, and his eyes dart to Baze’s. He raises one lean shoulder, the bare one, and half a smirk exposes the metal in his smile. He looks apologetic, resigned when he says, barely audible, “You look good. With long hair I mean, the beard. Very handsome.”

Baze scowls through his burning flush, and smooths a hand over his head. Thinks of the other boys who have already started shaving, with a low curl of embarrassment. After everything, Chirrut still feels the need to tease him.

“You’re so… big,” Chirrut breathes, his eyes locked on the other Baze’s back. Baze doesn’t understand why he isn’t curious to see his older self, because Baze needs to know, needs to see how Chirrut will—might, might look at him.

He looks back just in time to see the Guardian Baze taking Guardian Chirrut’s hand, and his stomach twists uncomfortably. Chirrut is tugged into their eyeline, and Baze’s breath catches at the sight of him, taller and with broader shoulders, muscle clearly filling his frame where _his_ Chirrut is still boyish with room to grow.

He’s gorgeous. His head isn’t completely shaven either, a shock of dark hair just long enough to bury fingers into, lessening the severity of his eyebrows. The proud, supple mouth is the same. The high and handsome cheekbones. Baze drinks in the same tilt of the head, the unadorned pink flash of gums and straight white teeth. Then the other Baze is guiding Chirrut’s hand to the lotus on the wall, and Baze realises two things in a thunderclap instant.

First, their counterparts’ other hands are entwined together so intimately, so tangled in each other’s sashes around their waists that his ears burn. Secondly, the older Chirrut’s eyes are a milky, whitish blue.

He’s frozen in place, can only breathe in shallow, open-mouthed trepidation as his Chirrut’s hand darts out to grip his own again.

“I’m blind?” he croaks. He kneads at his chest, where Baze knows the kyber rests, now. Baze reaches jerkily for him, clasping his shoulder, the side of his neck, thumbing beneath his dark eyes, the twin seas Baze has been drowning in from the very start.

“Don’t say it, Chirrut, I’m begging you.”

He’s rewarded with a shaky smile. “Don’t worry, even I’m not that much of a martyr yet.”

“It’s all a vision, it must be. Just a vision.” Baze squeezes his hand and revels in the way Chirrut’s eyes warm towards him for the first time since their fight, so long ago. “You don’t have braces any more,” he says, nodding in the spire’s direction. He takes a breath, clings to Chirrut’s hand that still hasn’t let go. “Looks good,” he mumbles.

Chirrut snickers at him, sounding breathless, but they’re startled apart by a loud grunt behind them and turn to squint in unison through the debris.

If Baze had felt shaken before, nothing in his life has compared to the shock that rips through him, like he’s been fired from an airlock, and he gasps for air just the same.

Their mouths are pressed together, the other Chirrut shoving Baze’s other self hungrily back into the stone. Baze watches, physically incapable of tearing his eyes away from the way his _own_ hands wind around Chirrut’s heaving shoulders, the way Chirrut’s smile looks when it’s cradling his own bruised mouth. His throat tightens in painful rictus, the way it had during his third duan trials in the desert, desperate for water.

The Chirrut beside him is crouched and wild-looking, like a cornered animal. He won’t meet Baze’s eyes, and Baze feels the first icy dread wrack through him. Is Chirrut—surely Chirrut isn’t disgusted. Plenty of Temple members engage in flings, some more serious than others, and Chirrut can’t be unaware that nearly half of his rose day suitors are other boys.

Maybe it’s just because it’s Baze kissing him. He fights down the lump in his throat.

The other Chirrut is moaning into _his_ mouth now, and they’ve slid down the side of the tower to slump in a heaving tangle of limbs and robes, fanned out over their lower bodies, though it doesn’t take much imagination to guess at what’s causing Chirrut’s hips to jerk like that where they’re straddling the other’s lap. His face is on fire, but he can’t close his eyes, he can’t look away, so determined not to catch any glimpse of disappointment or revulsion on his Chirrut’s face.

It’s mesmerising. He watches his own hips arch the way he knows they do when an earth-shattering orgasm is approaching, he watches Chirrut’s tongue flick into his mouth and retreat, drawing a deep groan from his broader, older chest. He didn’t know he was capable of making that sound. Maybe he isn’t, maybe Chirrut knocked him out under the orange tree and this is all a pathetic coma-dream.

He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He buries them between his knees and tries with all his might to will away the tightening in his soft breeches.

Chirrut is rocking back and forth on his haunches beside him, his eyes never leaving the sight. His torn sleeve has slipped from his shoulder completely now and he looks so savagely beautiful, ragged and flushed in the stained glass evening glow of the sun glazing NaJedha’s rings.

With a jolt he remembers that he’s trying not to look, but he’s staggered by the unfiltered _longing_ on Chirrut’s face. Baze’s whole body is burning, his eyes blur wet with hot, overwhelmed emotion that ricochets a fiery bolt down his spine to the blooming corkscrew of arousal in his lower belly. He presses down against his misbehaving cock and shuts his eyes against the knowledge that Chirrut’s is bare, for him, mere feet away.

Nothing will be the same between them, after this. He isn’t sure he wants it to be.

The other Chirrut is whimpering hoarse nothings into other Baze’s neck, but it isn’t the way his hips are rolling and thrusting forward, it isn’t the flash of strong, tanned thigh beneath that sheer sash that clenches Baze’s heart with jealousy. He realises in a distant way that it’s ridiculous to be jealous of what is essentially himself, but this may never happen. This may never _have_ happened, might not even be happening now.

No, what ignites the carved-out hollow behind his sternum, the one brimming with choking envy, is the look of naked adoration on his own face.

It’s the way Chirrut can’t seem to decide on the part of him he wants to touch most, his long clever fingers flitting to grope at chest muscles and thick middle and dragging up to cup Baze’s jaw, stroke his ear. It’s the fact that he’s allowed to look at Chirrut like that, the way he’s never allowed himself to.

His counterpart shudders when Chirrut softly kisses the unfamiliar scar on his face, and whispers something to make Baze look both delighted and exasperated at once, before he licks across his upper lip to suck his tongue back into Chirrut’s mouth.

He can’t help the low noise that feels like a shipwreck pulled from his whirlpool chest at the sight of Chirrut drawing his dark, calloused hand around and behind him, under the robes to press at some unseen place. Too late he realises what he’s done and claps his hand over his mouth, but not before his Chirrut has jerked to stare at him, shocked. Chirrut seems unaware of the bulge in his own lap, and one of Baze’s eyes wells over to spill a salty tide down his cheek. It’s too much. It’s too much.

All at once there’s a scuffling by the pillar, the other Baze’s legs scrabbling on the sandy stone beneath them while Chirrut wails into his shoulder in clenching waves. The ringing building in Baze’s ears is whirling, as if he’s caught inside the great dome of a bell itself. He watches himself hug Chirrut tight enough to be bone-crushing to his chest as he comes, and he’s sure his older self knows just as well as he does that Chirrut is always able to take it.

“—Chirrut, Chirrut I love—I love you—”

It’s this gasping declaration that finally breaks the younger Chirrut’s silence. A hurt, broken noise punches out of him with all the force of a pressurised blaster bolt-gun, and he looks frozen with terrified mortification. Baze isn’t sure he can bridge the gap between them to silence him, it feels so charged with something thick and heavily new that he would electrify himself in the attempt.

Between rasping, panted breaths, “Is someone there?”

“Who would be here, we’re the only ones who come here any more.”

“ _Tch._ You never know, beloved, maybe we have an audience.”

“So full of yourself. You’ll be charging ticket admission next.”

“Hm.”

“... That was a joke.”

Baze is rooted to the spot. Beloved. Love, he’d said to Chirrut, he’d called him—

His Chirrut is still wild-eyed and gripping at his pendant with both hands, but he’s staring back at Baze now, giddy excitement and hope starting to spread across his face. They’re still bickering, over there.

“You make them so rarely, how am I to tell whether you’re being serious or not?”

“When I’m joking, I’ll do _this.”_

Older Chirrut yelps a laugh that startles Baze so suddenly he wobbles sideways, knocking a huge pot to the ground with a deafening smash. He sprawls on the stone in clear view of the two adults, still kneeling sweaty and rumpled. Chirrut is gripping his staff with both hands, a familiar uncompromising ferocity still visible in his cloudy eyes, that flinty crocodile flash.

A chorus of thundering, buzzing bells rings through his head as he catches sight of the glowing kyber shards set into the end of the staff. Eight, one for each duan.

He shields his face from the bellowing white rainbow that floods his vision, Chirrut’s body protecting him from himself the last thing to be blown apart into stars and lotus flames.

 

~

 

It’s funny, Baze thinks, how much a place can change and feel just discomfiting enough when the light is wrong for the time of day.

Weak spring sunlight filters unbidden through the open skylight high above them, not yet completely overgrown with creepers and hanging mosses. The first thing he registers is that Chirrut is underneath him again, heaving from the fight, and he pushes quickly up onto his elbows and away.

“I didn’t imagine that, did I?” he says slowly.

He rubs a hand over his scalp, almost disappointed to find it smooth. Another life. Another time, maybe. He swivels around to take in the riad.

The tree’s shadow barely touches the pots of sweet incense lined haphazardly before the public altars. Dust drifts with leftover crumbs and leaves across the bright mosaics, unbroken and familiar.

Chirrut clears his throat, and Baze can hardly bring himself to look up at him from under the brim of his hat.

“So,” Chirrut falters, all trace of cockiness or anger bled from his voice. Baze’s heart is in his mouth. “I’m going to go blind.”

Of course. Baze is so selfish, their relationship in the dream, the vision, hadn’t been the only devastating revelation.

His hands tremble where he twists them in his robes, like they had six years ago. He had wanted to reach out to Chirrut then too, ease his pain, let him know it was going to be okay. He hadn’t done it then, and look where they had ended up, lost and unable to say what they really felt.

If he reaches out now, maybe he can change things. For the better. He lets his fingers brush carefully over the hand Chirrut is kneading in the soil, and all the air rushes from his lungs when Chirrut grasps at him, tight and desperate.

“Baze,” he chokes.

“None of that, in there, none of it needs to happen. We can stop it.” He grip spasms at Chirrut’s stricken look, nearly gagging on his tongue in his rush to correct himself, “I mean, some of it. Some of it doesn’t need to happen. The blindness part, specifically. Um. The rest of it can happen, if you want it to.” He swallows hard and mentally kicks himself into low orbit.

Steam from the floor vents coils around them, beading condensation on their clothes and skin. Chirrut sighs on a chuckle like he’s enjoying a private joke, and lets his arm trail through the humid mist. He’s not as dark as he normally is, not as dark as he was _then._ No one hates being cooped up during winter more than Chirrut, but his limbs are still long and golden like an effigy, hung with marigolds and set alight. Baze aches for him.

“All is as the Force wills it,” Chirrut says quietly, plucking an orange blossom from Baze’s shoulder.

Baze watches the lone flower flutter to the side, and chooses to ignore him. “What we saw, that wasn’t the Force’s doing.”

Once, Chirrut’s laugh would have stung. Once, Baze would have mistaken it for careless mockery, rather than the armour it was. “No, no, I’m quite sure most of that was my doing. This is why I waited so long.”

Baze frowns. “What?”

“This, all of this that just happened. I wanted you to figure it out for yourself. I thought I knew how you felt about me—” The look he shoots Baze is severe, and Baze shuts his mouth on a protest. “Please. All that pouting every rose day. If I’d known how dense you were going to be I’d have given you a hundred lotuses and had done with it.”

Baze’s mind reels, and Chirrut smirks at him, tries to ground him again with a firm swipe of his thumb across his knuckles.

He continues, “I knew from that first day. You were the one who stood up and it _sang_ for you.” Here he taps the crystals dangling on his chest. "I have always known you were strong enough."

Baze reaches tentatively up to match the burn on his palm to the one on Chirrut’s sternum, and nearly collapses when Chirrut’s eyelashes flutter shut at his touch.

“I—I didn’t know,” Baze whispers. This all feels so fragile, and yet so inevitable. Like life, like death.

Chirrut snorts. “How could you? Apparently my flirting leaves much to be desired.” His smile fades and the corners of his mouth dip, and Baze has never wanted to kiss him so desperately. “You thought I’d hurt you.”

Baze needs to make this right, once and for all. “I didn’t think that. I know what you can do, but I also know you’d never hurt me. I know what you’ve been through, I was just _worried_ about you. That you’d self-destruct, or something.” He gulps, but pushes his last confession. “I was trying to protect you.”

“See!” Chirrut laughs. “You really did think I was a bomb.”

Baze opens his mouth and shuts it again, thinking better of the soft thing he was going to say. Chirrut tilts his head at him with a kinder smile. He knows, even through it all he always knows when Baze needs comforting. He doesn’t always act on it, though. He crooks a sly grin at him, leaning forward.

“I can’t believe you came chasing after me like a loon. Like a valiant knight in those stories of yours.”

Baze harrumphs, secretly glad that Chirrut’s disorienting melancholy has passed with Baze finally telling the truth. “You always liked those stories when I read them to you.”

“Aha, no, I liked the sound of _you_ reading them, there is a difference.”

Ducking his head won’t hide Baze’s blush, but he tries. “If I’m a loon for chasing you, what does that make you for running in the first place?”

He waits while Chirrut turns their hands over, contemplating. “It makes me selfish,” he says eventually. “Self-preservationist. Very un-Guardianlike.”

Baze scratches his nose and thinks. He himself might need the occasional comforting, but Chirrut has never learned how to be coddled. He says, “We’ll both be Guardians.”

It’s the right thing to say. Chirrut beams at him, all awkward gums and metal tracks, his endoskeleton lit from the inside by the burning dark kyber of his heart. Baze can hear it ring.

“We will, won’t we?” he says. Baze nods.

Chirrut switches to South Jedhan and says something to him, shuffling closer to Baze and twining their fingers together. He tries very hard not to let go and do something stupid, like twirl Chirrut around.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s something my brother used to say. I don’t know how to translate it.”

Baze rolls his eyes. That usually means it’s something to make fun of him by.

“I can show you what it means though?”

Baze eyes him, suddenly wary. “Alright?”

Chirrut knocks his sunhat aside and fists his hands in the front of his robes, pushes him over into the dirt so he can straddle Baze’s hips.

“Just like before, right?” he says, eyes bright and colour high across his cheekbones. “Or, just like later, I suppose.”

Baze coughs and tries resting his hands on Chirrut’s thighs, careful in case they scald him. He’s a beautiful eclipse, haloed in the sunlight filtering through the dark leaves above them. “Your brother used to talk about this?”

Chirrut groans and wriggles his hips, effectively shutting him up. His tunic is slipping from his shoulder again and Baze thinks about murmuring love words into it as he comes. It makes him shift awkwardly where he lies. It’ll take time to work up to the ease in his body he had watched, but he wouldn’t mind practicing, if it was with Chirrut.

“To _girls_ , he said it to _girls_ he brought back with him.”

Baze raises his eyebrows. “I’m not a girl, Chirrut.”  

Chirrut smiles blinding at him, the vicious edge to it lighting the steel of his braces and making Baze’s heart thunder in his chest. Not vicious. Scarily enthusiastic. “I can feel that, Malbus.”

“Come here,” Baze growls, hoping to distract Chirrut from his situation. It works, and Chirrut crashes forward like a solar flare, sloppy and blazing and unpracticed but kissing years of wanting into him in one fell swoop. Baze gasps and Chirrut darts in, takes the opportunity presented to him as he always does, always reckless and willing to disregard all consequences. But Baze has been waiting too.

He surges up and kisses wildly, like he saw himself do, the way he knows will draw those harsh breaths from Chirrut’s nose as he refuses to release his mouth. Chirrut’s hands slip from his shoulders to thud into the dirt on either side of him, knocking his braces into Baze’s teeth.

“Sorry, sorry,” he pants, but Baze just grabs for him again, hooking his hands under the soft hinge of his jaw and clutching him closer as he licks at Chirrut’s bottom lip. He shoves his hand into the torn robes and drags his blunt nails over Chirrut’s ribs, swallows Chirrut’s gasp and replaces it with his own.

“You’re so—gods,” pants Chirrut, dropping his head onto Baze’s shoulder, “—really making up for lost time, I’ve wanted you for so long, I want—”

“Me too,” Baze says, muffled where he’s biting at Chirrut’s throat, nudging his knee up between Chirrut’s thighs. He’s met with a breathless, hiccuping laugh that turns quickly to keening as he pulls Chirrut’s hips down to meet his own, and suddenly Chirrut’s pulling none too gently on his ears.

“Don’t grow your hair out yet,” Chirrut says, heat lacing thick through his cracking voice, “I want to see _all_ of you, before I go blind.”

Baze shoves his thigh up with more force, spearing a long, indignant-sounding moan from Chirrut’s core. He’s going to say something equally idiotic about braces, and biting, but a chorus of surprised squealing stills Chirrut’s hands where they’re fumbling open his robes.

“Stars _above_ , Chirrut, you could have just let me know that this is what you wanted to switch shifts for.”

Baze peers over Chirrut’s shoulder, since the boy doesn’t seem to want to lift his hot face from where it’s buried in the curve of Baze’s neck. Qilung is glaring at them unimpressed, not looking sick in the slightest, with one set of arms folded and the other set on her hips. There’s a gaggle of other girls behind her, all of them bright scarlet and giggling, more than one of them looking in turns crestfallen and gleaming with jealousy.

“Well, Baze? This place is a mess, have you guys even swept anything? Or have you been,” she waves a hand, “busy the whole time?”

Baze clears his throat and shoves at Chirrut’s head, because his silent sniggering is ticklish. “Uh, busy.”

A young Twi’lek girl burst into a peal of hysterical laughter, but stops when Qilung stares down at her.

Chirrut levers himself up and casts his most roguish grin back over his shoulder, the one he knows can make people do his bidding. Not the one he reserves for Baze. “We were just leaving, actually.”

Qilung sputters as Chirrut stands, brushing himself off and offering a hand to Baze, who seriously hopes his own robes are more concealing than Chirrut’s are.

“But—the riad— _Chirrut,_ if the Masters see this they’ll think I didn’t do any work!”

“You didn’t,” shrugs Chirrut, flicking Baze in his ear when he bats Chirrut’s hands away from brushing dirt from his backside. “Just blame Baze.”

“Oh, I will,” she calls after them, as Baze strides away to the cool peace of the hallways, soon to be broken when the next bells ring, hauling Chirrut along behind him. “Congratulations, boys.”

Chirrut trips over himself laughing, plows into Baze’s back to wrap his arms around him from behind.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“You know where we’re going,” Baze says. “We’re going to scratch our names into that wall.”

Chirrut cackles, unhinged with happiness, and Baze lets himself look the way he’s always wanted to. He pushes open the heavy doors with a grin, and they set out to write their own history.


End file.
